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By Sergio Salotto
The virtues of compromise are expounded to be an essential element in our life if we want to experience and enjoy good, healthy relationships—be they intimate, friendship, workplace, political or other. Compromise is considered to be how we demonstrate our sense of caring, love, understanding, willingness to accept another person’s point of view, allowing everyone the opportunity to win, unselfishness and other such good social personality qualities.
What this also implies however is that if you do not compromise, you are unlikely to enjoy any kind of good, wholesome relationships. In fact, you are likely to be considered and labeled as self-righteous and arrogant, selfish, uncaring, self-centered and so on. In other words, not a very nice person. Something no one likes to be because it would make us socially unacceptable. And this would result in us being shunned and rejected triggering our feelings and fears of not being part of, being alone, unwanted and therefore unloved. Whenever we experience such rejection, this triggers our belief that, “I am not OK, or, I am not good enough” or whichever other such personal fear you may experience. This is a feeling and fundamental belief we have carried from an early age.
It is a belief we have also fought against and strived to overcome through almost everything we do in life whether it be in our intimate relationships, career, sports, parenting or whatever. Our fear and belief of “not being good enough” is the fundamental reason why we decide to behave in ways that we believe will make us acceptable to everyone else; it is the fundamental need behind why we take up smoking, drinking, drugging, partying, strive to climb the corporate ladder at any cost in order to be successful and gain recognition, use sex as a tool for control and acceptance. Like for example, men may use sex to prove their manhood, feed their ego, exercise control and dominance; girls and/or women on the other hand initially may have given up their virginity out of fear of losing a boyfriend, to be seen equal to other girls, to be the “popular one”, out of fear of not being loved, not being acceptable, pose naked or semi-naked for magazine covers or billboards, others prostitute themselves for the sake of earning an income, and so on.
What these behaviors really show is how you will do almost anything no matter how self-destructive it may be either physically or emotionally just to satisfy your fear of being rejected and/or bring some meaning into your life. And at the time, you do not stop to consider any of the possible consequences. Instead, to experience immediate self-gratification or escape the pain of feeling rejected you get caught up in the hype for partying, drinking, drugging, or whatever with your peers. In these moments you do not stop to really consider “Why” you are doing or behaving the way you do. All you want is to have fun and feel part of. Strange or unbelievable as this may sound, what you are really doing by engaging in such self-destructive behavior is to compromise on who you really are; your greater Inner Self—and am not referring to any religious, mystical or metaphysical being, I am referring to the real you, the greater you. But, in order to experience the payoffs, you will compromise yourself.
Let me be clear on something. Yes, of course having sex is fun and can be healthy. What I am focusing on here though is not so much what you do, but rather on your need for doing it. In other words, “Why?” you do or behave the way you do despite the destructive consequences many of your actions have on you.
This is how people behave in almost every aspects of their life. Consider for example intimate or family relationship situations. How many times do you compromise yourself to avoid an argument, being rejected, out of fear being considered not to be good child, parent or partner. And all the other things you do just so that you can be accepted by others. It is not different in the workplace. How many times have you compromised yourself and gone against your gut feel out of fear of losing your job, foregoing your career aspirations, losing your accumulated pension, and so on? Undoubtedly, very often… if not daily.
So why do you compromise? Because you get Payoffs in the form of feeling good about being part of a group, being the same as everyone else, being popular, feeds your macho ego, you are seen to be “a man”, believe that giving up your virginity will make your partner love and cherish you as special, being accepted by your parents, partner or employers, being recognized as a worthy employee thus stand a chance to climb the corporate ladder in your career, and so on. In other words, you behave like this because of the emotional payoffs you stand to gain—appeasing your emotional fears of “not being good enough.”
But are you really permanently eliminating your fear of “not being good enough” by compromising? The chances are that despite your compromises you are not. That is why you experience the need to keep compromising; you have a persistent need to appease your emotional fear of not being acceptable, fear of rejection and therefore fear of “not being good enough.”
The reality however is that despite the immediate emotional payoffs we will experience in the moment—which can be of any duration, these behaviors and habits do not really eradicate our inner feeling and belief that “I am not good enough”—a general term I use to refer to more unique individual such as “I am not wanted”, “I am not important”, “I am not lovable” or any other such deep seated fundamental belief you have about yourself.
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